Hopefully this will improve the quality of Japanese and sushi restaurants in the Bay Area where we woefully lag LA. It’s too much to expect SF to out-scout teams that have been in that market for years, like LA and Seattle.

The reason that so few teams are in Japan are because of the distribution of talent and the contracts given in NPB.

Japanese teams have 10 years of control over players (give or take) before they become free agents. And if you want a player before then, you have to do the whole posting thing, which really cuts in to whatever benefits you can get. Plus the player has to actually want to go to the majors and basically get screwed as half of what the team would pay for him will go to the team that currently holds his contract.

The other major leagues are the Shikoku Island League and the Company Leagues. The Island League has spawned some decent talent, I suppose, but the level of play is nowhere near that of the NPB or the higher minor leagues. Same with the company leagues, which are further complicated by the fact that the players are employees of the companies they are playing for, which gives them security a minor league contract likely won’t.

The biggest scouting opportunity in Japan is the High School baseball tournament (held twice a year, though the major one is in the summer) which is where players like Matsuzaka became famous resulting in them getting drafted early and immediately having a spot on a professional roster. Instead of getting a full-time professional job, they’d be relegated to the low minors in the US, and that’s probably far less appealing to most of them (especially since there are specials on Japanese TV about Japanese players in the minor leagues in the US, and how not-so-glamorous the lifestyle is).

Then we would have to get into language and cultural barriers, etc. which just make it less cost effective than scouting in other regions.

I’m not saying it isn’t worth it, or that there isn’t talent here, but it’s certainly not surprising that there are only 5 teams with scouts here. Which 5, exactly?